Mr Bush said the idea that he was currently visiting Africa looking for sites for US bases was “baloney”.

Mr Bush is on the second-to-last stop of a five-country Africa tour.

He said the new command, Africom, was to provide African states with military training and assistance so they could handle Africa’s problems better.

“It is a command structure that is aiming to help provide military assistance to African nations so African nations are more capable of dealing with Africa’s conflicts – like peacekeeping training,” he said.

Critics say Africom is designed to protect strategic American interests on the continent such as oil.

Africom is a benign command structure that will both ensure the security of strategic American interests, and teach American-style problem solving techniques to a continent that sorely needs them.

Frei: Yesterday, Steven Spielberg – the Hollywood director – pulled out of the Beijing Olympics over Darfur. He said the Chinese aren’t doing enough to stop the killing in Darfur. Do you applaud his move?

Mr Bush: That’s up to him. I’m going to the Olympics. I view the Olympics as a sporting event. On the other hand, I have a little different platform than Steven Spielberg so, I get to talk to President Hu Jintao. And I do remind him that he can do more to relieve the suffering in Darfur. There’s a lot of issues that I suspect people are gonna, you know, opine, about during the Olympics. I mean, you got the Dali Lama crowd. You’ve got global warming folks. You’ve got, you know, Darfur and… I am not gonna you know, go and use the Olympics as an opportunity to express my opinions to the Chinese people in a public way ’cause I do it all the time with the president. I mean. So, people are gonna be able to choose – pick and choose how they view the Olympics.

But his most controversial remarks were over waterboarding. He told the BBC’s Matt Frei: “To the critics, I ask them this: when we, within the law, interrogate and get information that protects ourselves and possibly others in other nations to prevent attacks, which attack would they have hoped that we wouldn’t have prevented?

What? In english please you mentally challenged muppet-bot! This half-wit should be impeached for crimes against cogency alone.

“And so, the United States will act within the law. We’ll make sure professionals have the tools necessary to do their job within the law.”

He claimed the families of victims of the July 7 terror attacks in London would understand his position. “I suspect the families of those victims understand the nature of killers. What people gotta understand is that we’ll make decisions based upon law. We’re a nation of law.”

dem·a·gogue n.
A leader who obtains power by means of impassioned appeals to the emotions and prejudices of the populace.

In the BBC interview, Bush was asked whether, given waterboarding and other alleged human rights abuses, he could claim the US still occupied the moral high ground. He replied: “Absolutely.”

He added: “We believe in human rights and human dignity. We believe in the human condition. We believe in freedom. And we’re willing to take the lead. We’re willing to ask nations to do hard things. We’re willing to accept responsibilities. And – yeah, no question in my mind, it’s a nation that’s a force for good.

“And history will judge the decisions made during this period of time as necessary decisions.”

More “history will judge” nonsense from the functional-illiterate-in-chief. As if the passage of time could ever mitigate the disaster that is his administration, or paint it in a more sympathetic light. Would you like to know how much of the present (the part of the present whose interests your decisions don’t serve, that actually respects human rights, and that don’t blindly worship authority) judges the decisions you have made? Would you even listen?

On Guantánamo Bay, where the US has held hundreds of prisoners for years without trial, he said he would “like it to be empty” but he was “comfortable with recognising this is still a dangerous world”.

He said: “There’s some people there that need to be tried. And there will be a trial. And they’ll have their day in court. Unlike what they did to other people.

“Now, there’s great concern about and I can understand this, that these people be given rights. They’re not willing to grant the same rights to others. They’ll murder. But, you gotta understand, they’re getting rights. And I’m comfortable with the decisions we’ve made.”

He is comfortable with the decisions they’ve made. He is a sociopath.

Commenting on at his legacy, he listed as pluses Afghanistan, Iraq and recognition of the right to Palestinians to their own state.

“You know, dealing with liberating 25 million in Afghanistan is part of what I hope people think of when they look at my presidency. Being the first president to propose a two-state solution on Israel and Palestine. I mean, there’s a lot of other issues. And I’m happy with Iraq.

“The … decision to move Saddam Hussein was right. And this democracy [in Iraq] is now taking root.

“And I’m confident that if America does not become isolationist – you know, and allow the terrorists to take back over, Iraq will succeed.”

The Bush-bot is happy with Iraq. Bless his feeble mind! He’s like a child who proudly reveals a stool to an adoring parent; “I made this!”. And he says this democracy thing is taking root in Iraq. That’s right; exiles are returning to Iraq in their droves.

Isn’t it obvious his legacy will be one of lies and genocide? His fabrications have resulted in the deaths of millions. He is a mass murderer. He is a terrorist. And to be perfectly frank, after the last 7 or 8 years, the rest of the world, I’m sure, would welcome an isolationist America. Because we are now very afraid of you America.

Less than a month after President Bush signed legislation overhauling the Freedom of Information Act, the measure’s main Senate backers are accusing the White House of planning to scuttle a special FOIA office in violation of the law.

An aide to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said Office of Management and Budget officials have told committee staff that they plan in the president’s FY09 budget to park within the Justice Department all the funding authorized by the new law for a Government Information Services Office within the National Archives and Records Administration.

The office would include an ombudsman to oversee FOIA disputes across government. It is intended to push agencies to comply with the law, address FOIA backlogs and speed up resolution of FOIA requests. The office has not received any appropriations and its budget has not been set.

But by shifting the funding to the Justice Department, OMB would effectively eliminate the office, because it appears no similar operation would be created there, Leahy’s aide said. Instead, the funds apparently would go to the department’s Information Policy Office, which now oversees government FOIA compliance.

The recently enacted FOIA bill, sponsored in the Senate by Leahy and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, deliberately located the new office outside of Justice.

National Archives officials are relatively independent of political pressure, the staffer explained, “but DOJ is different.” Government transparency advocates consider the department hostile to efforts to improve FOIA responsiveness, in part because it represents agencies sued by FOIA requesters.

In a floor speech Wednesday, Leahy called the White House’s prospective plans illegal. “Such a move is not only contrary to the express intent of the Congress, but it is also contrary to the very purpose of this legislation, to ensure the timely and fair resolution of Americans’ FOIA requests,” he said. Though creation of the office is one of a series of steps mandated by the legislation, Leahy indicated it is a key component of the bill.

Cornyn has taken the same position. “He does agree with Senator Leahy and would oppose that effort,” a Cornyn spokesman said.

An OMB spokesman said yesterday he could not comment on whether the administration has the authority to move the money to Justice, because doing so would require speculating about the budget before its Feb. 4 unveiling. “This will be answered when the budget is released,” he said.

Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, an umbrella group for organizations advocating increased federal transparency, said the White House may say shifting the money to Justice is just a preliminary step before the office in the National Archives is set up. But even initially “putting it in DOJ would essentially obviate what Leahy and Cornyn did with the legislation,” McDermott said.

Bush signed the bill on New Year’s Eve, and its passage went relatively unnoticed at a time when the media was focused squarely on the first presidential primary contests. See reports from CongressDaily, AP and The Swamp for background on the legislation.

It’s the logic of rendition; in the Government Information Services Office current location we have little control over FOIA requests, so in order to take control we move it to a location more conducive to our intentions (some underground prison in Egypt for example… or better yet, the DOJ).

Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio may get excluded from Democratic presidential debates, as he has been recently, but no one can deny him the floor in the House.

And today Mr. Kucinich took to the floor to fire off his latest salvo at the Bush administration: his plans to introduce Articles of Impeachment against President Bush on Jan. 28 — the day of Mr. Bush’s State of the Union speech.

Accusing the administration of lying about the need for the war in Iraq, Mr. Kucinich said he did not need to hear the president’s assessment. “We know the State of the Union,” he declared. “It’s a lie.”

He also fired a volley at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California who has maintained that impeaching Mr. Bush is not on the table for Congressional Democrats. “If impeachment is off the table,” Mr. Kucinich said, “truth is off the table. If truth is off the table then this body is living a lie.”

Mr. Kucinich introduced Articles of Impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney last April and in November, with the surprise help of Republicans seeking to embarrass the Democrats, he nearly succeeded in securing an hour of debate on the House floor. House Democratic leaders blocked that, however, by referring the impeachment effort back to the Judiciary Committee.

Anti-Bush groups have been urging Mr. Kucinich to undertake an effort to impeach the president.

Get a move on you clowns! Within a year they’ll have all escaped to SouthAmerica, with Hitler and various graduates of the School of the Americas, and it’ll be too late. All the same, kudos to Kucinich.